In the voice of Homer
Sing, O Muse, of the children who journeyed by yellow-painted chariot, their duffels heaped like the spoils of modest wars, down roads that wound through the pine-dark country where the lake lay shining like Athena's shield.
Tell of the dust that rose behind the buses, golden as the fleece that Jason sought, and of the counselors, bronze-limbed, standing at the gate like sentinels of some kinder Troy.
For here no blood was asked of any hero— only sunscreen, and the willingness to sing. The cabins stood in rows like ships beached gently on a shore where every tide brought only joy.
And the children poured out, loud as the Achaeans, claiming bunks as warriors claim a hill, and the screen doors slammed—a hundred slammings— and the summer, wide and green, said: Welcome. Begin.
In the voice of Walt Whitman
O the lake! The immeasurable, shimmering, democratic lake! I sing the body electric with goosebumps, every child a nation unto themselves wading in up to their sovereign knees.
I celebrate the belly-flop, the cannonball, the tentative toe-dip, the shriek that is the body's honest parliament voting unanimously: this water is freezing.
I have observed the dragonfly. I have loved the dragonfly. It stitches the air above the dock like a thought you almost had, then lost, then had again.
And the canoes! Rude and beautiful canoes! Containing multitudes, or at minimum two campers and a counselor named Dave who insists on proper J-strokes.
Every paddle-splash a verse, every ripple a footnote, and the lake accepts them all, the confident and the afraid, the ones who swim to the platform and the ones who cling to the rope and the rope does not judge them, nor do I.
In the voice of Charles Dickens
It was the best of meals, it was the worst of meals. It was the age of bug juice, it was the epoch of mystery meat, it was the season of seconds, it was the winter of someone else having taken the last chocolate pudding.
The dining hall, that great and creaking cathedral of plywood, held within its walls a society as complex and as fiercely stratified as any London drawing room. Here the table that shouted loudest was served first—a rule of nature as immutable as gravity, and twice as cruel.
Young Timothy Hutchins, a boy of perhaps eleven summers, possessing a face of such earnest sweetness that even the kitchen staff were moved to offer him an extra roll, sat wedged between two boys of larger frame who argued, with the passion of barristers, over whether a hot dog was technically a sandwich.
"It is!" declared the one.
"It is NOT!" roared the other.
And between them little Timothy ate in silence, happy, profoundly happy, in a manner available only to those who have not yet learned that happiness requires explanation.
In the voice of Shakespeare
Now is the summer of our deep content, Made glorious by this field of trampled grass! What light through yonder tree-line breaks? 'Tis east— 'Tis where the crimson banner hides, alas.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the field up with our fallen socks! In peace there's nothing so becomes a child As stillness and humility—but when The whistle blasts like a trumpet unto war, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, And lend the eye a terrible aspect!
Enter JESSICA, age nine, with flag.
She moves like Mercury, that winged rogue, Past Tommy and past Sarah and past Jake (Who guards the jail with all the urgency Of Cerberus, if Cerberus had braces). She bears the banner like a thing enchanted, Crosses the line—
A great tumult. Exeunt all, cheering.
The rest is celebration.
In the voice of Emily Dickinson
The Fire — it held us — like a Hand — That would not let us go — We sat in circles — small as Coins — And watched the Embers glow —
A Counselor with a Guitar — sang A Song we halfway knew — We mumbled through the Verses — then The Chorus — how it flew —
The Sparks went up — like Prayers released From some communal Chest — Each one a brief and burning Thing — Then darkness — like the rest —
But oh — the Faces — lit like Moons — In that circumference — Were more than Fire could account for — Something — more — immense —
I felt it in the Marshmallow — That charred and golden Sphere — A Sweetness not entirely Sugar — A sense — that God — was here —
In the voice of Gabriel García Márquez
Many years later, standing in her office on the forty-third floor of a building made entirely of glass and quarterly reports, Elena would remember the afternoon of the great thunderstorm, when the sky above Camp Wawona turned the color of a bruise and the rain came down with such magnificent indifference that even the boldest counselors abandoned their authority and ran screaming for the mess hall, where forty-seven children and eleven adults sat on the floor playing cards by flashlight while the heavens performed the only show on earth that no one has ever thought to charge admission for.
The thunder walked across the lake like a giant looking for something he had dropped there long ago. The lightning revealed the trees in stuttering photographs, each flash a memory before the memory had formed. And Tomás, who had been homesick since Tuesday, found himself leaning against the shoulder of a boy whose name he had not known that morning and would not forget for the rest of his life.
Outside, the rain erased the paths and filled the footprints and turned the softball diamond into a lake inside the larger metaphor of the lake, which was itself inside the still larger metaphor of childhood, which contains all weather, and is not sorry for any of it.
In the voice of Mary Oliver
Someone has built the fire higher than usual. Someone has understood, without being told, that this is the last one.
What will you do with this evening? This one wild and specific evening with its particular stars and its particular mosquitoes and its particular way of making you believe that time is a thing that happens to other people?
The children are writing addresses on each other's arms in ballpoint pen. They are making promises with the fierce sincerity of those who do not yet know what distance does.
I do not want to be the one who tells them.
Let them write. Let the ink soak into skin that will, by September, forget it was ever this brown, this warm, this written-upon.
Somewhere a loon is calling across the black water, asking nothing, offering nothing, except the information that it is alive, that it is here, that the lake is wide and the night is long and there is no reason, no reason at all, not to sing.
In the voice of Homer, returned
So the children departed, as all heroes must, from the country where they had been brave. Their chariots bore them back through the pine-dark roads, past the fields, past the ordinary world that had continued, astonishingly, without them.
And each one carried, packed beneath the dirty laundry and the single shoe whose twin was never found, a thing that had no name but weighed enough to last the winter—and the winter after that— and all the winters of the life to come.
For the gods, if they are kind, give us this: not the war, but the fire afterward. Not the journey, but the ones who sat beside us. Not the glory, but the smell of woodsmoke in a sweatshirt we will never wash.
And the lake. Always the lake. Shining behind the eyelids like a second sky, where we were young, and the water was cold, and we went in anyway.
Finis.